Pillow Peace, the sequel to Pillow Fight

Marny here...last week's Pillow Fight is resolved.  Peace on all fronts.  I think the finished pillow is lighthearted and cute!

Completed pillow!  

This is the first pillow attempt, discussed in last week's blog post.  There are too many fabric "voices" vying for attention here.  Maybe just the aqua should be used, or perhaps just the green, but not both.  Their lighter values are drawing attention to themselves.  Folding back one and then the other I discovered I was happier taking them both out.  They fought each other and distracted from the intended focus of the Vespa fabric.  

Needs more of an interior frame though.  The left and right sides of the interior unit look kind of lonely.

The green is a good solution.  It is a good value next to both the dark brown fabric with the circles and the medium dark fabric of the multicolored hexagons.  The focus is working and the darkest fabric still adds interest.  But hold on, maybe now there is too much green in proportion to the Vespa fabric.

Green border folded under to test.  The Vespa fabric is happily the focus and the darkest fabric adds interest but does not overpower.

Interior completed and oversized borders sewn on.  They are oversized because the pillow top will shrink a bit with quilting.

Next a three layer quilt sandwich made up of a light colored plain fabric, a piece of fusible batting and the pillow top is put together.  One piece of painters tape, sort of in the center and placed vertically, and off we go!

You can see two lines of stitching to the right of the tape, and the line of stitching just getting started.  My stitch length is lengthened to 4.  Normally I stitch seams with 2.5 or 2.  The thread is a light yellow-green in both the needle and bobbin threads.  It worked well to stitch all the lines top to bottom from the center of the pillow out to one edge at a time.  Then I placed the tape to the right of the original center stitched line and placed the pressor foot to the right of the tape to stitch.  This meant I always stitched from top to bottom.  Changing stitching directions might cause a distortion.

All the vertical quilting lines completed.  That was so quick and so much fun why not run the quilt lines left and right too?

The same techniques were employed, again starting somewhat in the center and working out to the edges.

All the stitching completed. 

Seems appropriate to end now, with the light from the setting sun on the top of the pillow!

Till next week.